


Grit

by recrudescence



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M, Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 19:52:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/pseuds/recrudescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe safety is best defined by Jiangyin, bundled into a backwoods settlement that Feds don't care enough to acknowledge and even the locals don't dare to tread.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grit

“We’ll be better now,” she promises, and Simon nods even though he knows better than to believe her.

He’s tired, wants to be filled with something other than fear, and sometimes when she’s in the infirmary she guides his fingers between hers and won’t let go. Swaying in place, spiderweb strands of hair brushing his arm.

“You need,” says River, a shadow falling over her eyes as she scrubs a plate. “Badly. And that has to come from me now.” Her wrists swirl beneath the soap-silvered water, voice and hands emerging wet. When she begins washing a knife, it doesn’t occur to Simon to take it from her. “Nowhere else you can go. We have to be everything now.”

The next time Serenity’s confiscated by Alliance, they run before their presence even has a chance to be suspected.

It's a thought that's crossed his mind in the past, now that he's a little less naive. The captain, during their first real conversation, informing him the safest place to be was on the move, and he'd believed it because he wanted to, never imagining that maybe it wasn't as true as it sounded at the time. Maybe safety is best defined by Jiangyin, bundled into a backwoods settlement that Feds don't care enough to acknowledge and even the locals don't dare to tread.

If he had the resources for it, he could graft new fingerprints onto her, but Corbin isn't that kind of town. Corbin is a second-rate handyman of a city with slate-gray skies and every aspect of life colored by steel production. With River’s help, Simon spins a CV for a man who doesn’t exist. He contacts the local medical facilities with queries of employment, shows up in person and charms his way through interviews, collected and professional and doing Osiris proud, and no one ever asks for references.

River turns to forgery in her spare time and, like anything worthy of receiving her concentration, excels at it. Kaylee’s expertise at scavenging and reutilizing spare parts was more contagious than Simon realized.

“I can’t give you a family, but I can give you yourself.” She looks so pleased with herself that all he can do is thank her.

_This is your medical license. This is your identity card. This is your marriage certificate._

It’s springtime when she finishes constructing them both from the ground up. “May. Good time to be born, good exemplifier of possibility.” He wishes she’d chosen another name for herself.

There isn’t a scrap of them left, not the Tams anymore, not connected by blood at all. They have new profiles and new identities and keep to themselves in town. He practices medicine and she keeps her hands busy working through tasks that are too easy for her mind but routine enough to be soothing, and every minute of the day he wants there to be something else for them. Something less dingy than this place, something with sunlight and certainty and a house with a porch. A little more saving and then maybe they can book passage to a world with more space, assuming he's lucky enough to find a ship like Serenity again.

He never waves. It's time they learned to make it on their own, and there’s a chance the ship’s been tagged to alert the Feds if he attempts contact. He knows it’s unlikely that Mal wouldn’t just cut and run and disable any sort of Alliance interference, but he tells himself it’s for the best.

Memories ripple up regularly: Jayne calling them dead weight, Book calmly defining the nature of government, Mal saying that he came back because they were crew. There’s nothing keeping him from returning once again, but until that time comes the smartest, safest thing for them to do is disappear. The ship's been searched multiple times and sooner or later there would be too many connections between Serenity and the Tams and there'd be too much danger to risk having them onboard.

“It was only a matter of time,” murmurs River.

Something more. Something tucked out of the way. Something with clean air. On Osiris, everything was filtered and regulated to preserve the deserving, discerning members of the population.

He has dreams, more often than he admits to himself, where River winds her arms around him and smiles, bright-eyed and dreamy. “We’ll be a real family now.”

"You were supposed to be taking your medicine."

"I stopped."

Unfailingly, her eyes are utterly guileless and impossibly young and he wants to slip her more to kill the thing inside her. It always ends with his sister’s neck snapping in his hands and his father’s disembodied voice grimly demanding why he couldn’t take care of her, and he jolts out of sleep clammy-damp, rushing from the room as quietly as he can but almost always waking up River anyway. She still threads their hands together sometimes, clinging and crying and reassuring him she can be a good wife, better than a sister, do right by him and always love him and have children if she were whole enough to manage it.

It worries him that maybe he’s made her worse by letting her believe this instead of just keeping her on the ship, that a mundane life is worse for her than a life on the run. This is stamping on Hippocrates in an entirely new, disturbing way.

Industrial workers, unionized medical staff, patching up similar hurts day after day. Insular community, everything the workforce needs, always extruding steel from every chrome-plated pore; he can feel it in his bones and see it in River’s eyes. Technologically behind, since it’s an isolated blue-collar area, and it’s fortunate there are no retinal scans or anything of that caliber. River asks where Serenity is sometimes and he tells her it’s better living without that anymore, they have everything they need already.

She kisses his cheek. “Growing thicker skins. Hardening up.” Her throat works as she swallows her medicine.

The sunsets, when it’s clear enough to see them, are spectacular visions of chemical-streaked vividness. Mandarin is the primary spoken language and River scratches the mosquito bites on her legs even after Simon puts salve on them, same as when she was seven years old. Sometimes, he dreams of Kaylee and wakes up in a flurry of shivers. River speaks less on those days.

They get by. Serenity can’t come back for them now.

Three years later, she does.

An almost-unfamiliar name uttered in a too-familiar voice, and his stomach twists.

“You can’t call me by that name anymore.” He tries to say it jokingly, but that was never his forte with Kaylee.

From the corner of his eye, he sees the glint of metal on his own hand, sees Kaylee’s hand flying towards her mouth but coming to a halt halfway there. “You’re married?”

Simon can’t speak.

“No. I understand.” A smile, kind as can be, and he feels bile surging in his throat, wonders why he decided to take care of the shopping today of all days. “You’re happy here. Made the place your own. I’m glad.”

“Your sister?” Jayne sounds worn and wary, but his eyes are as searing as stars.

“She died.” And he can’t say anything more than that. If Mal had been there, he’s sure he wouldn’t have been able to say anything at all.

“How was your day?” River asks when he comes home, kissing his cheek and showing the book she’s piecing together. She’s leveled out, taken a job. Reconstruction, archivist for the library, painstaking but absorbing work that keeps her busy and lets her learn. It’s good for her, something she would never have been able to do on Serenity and never would have chosen to do before going away to school.

Once, he might have told her how badly it hurt to see Kaylee looking as if he’d slapped her, Jayne turning without uttering another sound. How the world rushed into a wall of foreboding gray in front of his eyes, and he ran until his lungs and eyes were burning.

Simon takes her hand and studies the floor panels. “It was fine.”


End file.
